


Stop and Believe

by enigma731



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-31
Updated: 2015-08-31
Packaged: 2018-04-18 06:42:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4696013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enigma731/pseuds/enigma731
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha is there after every failed mission, the sense of responsibility weighing more heavily on her shoulders with each casualty. She understands now, if only because Clint’s morals have become her own, his debt to the innocent and the unprotected shared just as much as their partnership.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stop and Believe

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hanorganaas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hanorganaas/gifts).



> Written for the be_compromised promptathon. Thanks to [KristinaDavidovna](http://archiveofourown.org/users/KristinaDavidovna) for location research and general cheerleading.

([X](http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/georgeezra/budapest.html))

It doesn’t happen often.

The first time, they’ve been partnered for six months and have already managed to break the short-term success rate of any other pair of agents. They’ve gotten cocky, Natasha will be forced to admit later.

She goes into the job thinking it’s beneath her ability level, if not her current clearance. And Clint would never be wasted on something like this, were it not for S.H.I.E.L.D.’s lingering obsession with keeping her chaperoned at all times.

The assignment is in New York, just a few miles from HQ, and involves intercepting Martin Bosanac, a weapons dealer, in the subway and taking him out before he can sell any more deadly secrets onto the black market. It’s Sunday night and the station is mostly deserted, just a few harried-looking men and women hurrying home through the exhaust-scented breeze from the trains. A good night for a job like this, and a good setting, too.

“There,” Natasha breathes into the comm as she spots their man coming out of one of the trains. “Khaki pants, red shirt, baseball cap.” He’s not hard to spot, just him and an older woman toting bags of groceries getting off at this stop.

She’s the one on the ground as usual, but really she’s here as backup. Clint’s several hundred feet behind her, concealed in the shadows of a maintenance stairway. He has his bow out, she knows, is prepared to fire one of the special stealth arrows the tech team’s designed especially for situations like this: coated with deadly neurotoxin, but designed to melt away to nothing more than a dark stain just after contact.

“Got it,” Clint’s voice comes in her ear. “Taking the shot on three. Stay still.”

She nods slightly, knowing that he’ll see, and listens to his whispered count. Natasha isn’t sure how the next turn of events manages to unfold, far too fast for her to follow. The arrow flies true, silent in the air, yet somehow the target manages to turn and see it, grabs the old woman lightning-quick and spins her to serve as a human shield. She cries out abruptly, though whether at the assault or at the bite of the arrow, Natasha can’t see.

Bosanac lets the body slump unceremoniously to the ground, then reaches for something at his hip, probably a gun. Natasha doesn’t let him get that far, already has her own weapon out, uses it to put a silenced bullet between Bosanac’s eyes before turning and making a run toward Clint’s location. Messy, she knows, but the job’s still done, and this is exactly the sort of circumstance S.H.I.E.L.D.’s clean-up specialists exist to handle.

It isn’t until they’re out on the street, melted into the evening crowd, that Natasha glances over, catches a flash of the raw look of pain on Clint’s face.

“You hit?” she asks instinctively, though she doesn’t think that’s possible. They might have performed less than flawlessly, but she hasn’t lost all of her touch.

“What?” he asks, then shakes his head. “No. Why?”

Natasha shrugs. “Something’s wrong.”

Clint stops short, which nearly causes a woman pushing a stroller to bump into him. Natasha grabs him by the arm, smiles apologetically at the mother as she hauls Clint to the edge of the sidewalk against a building.

“You were there,” Clint hisses. “You happy a civilian died? We blew it.”

“We finished the job,” Natasha insists. “We probably saved hundreds.”

“Great,” Clint snaps. “I’m sure that erases what happened.”

Unease blooms in the pit of Natasha’s stomach, old instincts telling her that this sort of weakness is dangerous. “You’re not going to cry, are you?” she sneers, regretting the words the moment they’re out of her mouth.

Clint’s gaze darkens at that, and he twists out of her grasp. “Don’t worry. Not your problem.” He turns abruptly and walks away, disappearing too quickly for even her to follow.

She doesn’t see him for a week, after that, not even at work. When he finally re-emerges, in time for their next assignment, she doesn’t ask where he’s been. But she doesn’t forget his absence, either.

* * *

They’re in Sao Paulo, investigating a rural medical center S.H.I.E.L.D. has reason to believe is a front for human trafficking. They’ve split up, Natasha following a person of interest through the back hallways lined with desperate patients while Clint follows a separate lead. The man is pushing a janitorial cart, has paused to pour chemicals into a bucket that looks like he’s about to mop.

In the next instant, the man glances over his shoulder. The movement stirs the humid air; Natasha catches and identifies the familiar scent of accelerant, realizes she’s been made just as the mark strikes a match, drops it into the bucket which erupts in flames.

“Abort!” Natasha barks into her comm, hopes Clint’s in a position to hear her and evac. “Abort, they’re going to blow the place!”

She abandons all pretenses of stealth, turns and sprints for the nearest exit as there's an explosion in the hallway somewhere behind her, feels the heat chasing close on her heels. She stumbles outside just as a much bigger shockwave rocks through the place, the impact of the building crumbling sending her diving to the ground.

“Clint,” she says frantically into the comms, because she hasn’t seen him, has no idea whether he’s heard her warning or managed to get out. “Clint, report.” She chokes on the smoke that’s painting the air around her, the stench of burning flesh pungent and too familiar in the mix.

“Here,” says Clint, and she looks up to find him standing over her, holding out a hand to help her up.

He doesn’t try to hide the devastation on his face, and Natasha finds the moment’s relief suddenly overwhelmed by guilt. She understands better now than she did a year ago, she thinks, though she’s still too strongly conditioned for survival to feel the same sort of attachment he does to the innocent lives lost in this sort of failure. Still, she knows too well that they’ve come here to protect these people, to rescue them from being sold into the modern slave trade. Coming out alive while all of them burned was never in the cards, is nothing like the sort of redemption she’s been hoping to find with S.H.I.E.L.D.

Clint seems perfectly steady as they call in the extraction team, as they fly home and give their reports to Sitwell and Fury. He’s better at hiding his weakness in front of authority, Natasha has learned. Or maybe he just doesn’t even try with her.

When he doesn’t arrive for their usual sparring session the next morning, she isn’t surprised.

* * *

This time, Natasha doesn’t sit back and wait for him to return from wherever it is that he’s gone, far too curious about this habit of his, and maybe a bit concerned as well. It’s her fault, she thinks, though she’s aware that her conclusion defies logic. Still, she isn’t going to just shrug it off, feels like that would be a failure in her attempts to learn something like sound morals.

Instead she puts in for leave as well, breaks into Clint’s computer in his cubicle before concluding that there’s nothing useful in his files. She isn’t stymied though, hacked his phone months ago and installed a tracker she’s halfway sure he knows about and allows.

Natasha rents a car and follows his signal, which he doesn’t seem to be taking any measures to conceal. It’s easy, far easier than most of her reconnaissance jobs, but then it’s not like Clint’s ever really made an effort to hide from her. Stupid, she’d thought at first, but she isn’t so sure anymore.

The trail leads her upstate, to the Adirondacks. She passes by the popular campgrounds, the lodges and chalets typically occupied by particularly affluent vacationers. The cabin where she finds Clint is several miles up a dirt road, tucked so far back into the trees that she has to park and hike the last three miles in. For a moment she wonders if this might be a mistake, if he could be misleading her. But as the building finally comes into view, she hears the unmistakable sound of him drilling with his bow somewhere on the other side of it, the steady _thunk_ of arrows hitting targets, one after the next.

Natasha follows the noise cautiously, aware that she’s probably going to startle him, probably won’t be particularly welcome here. Still, she has to know, has to understand his reasons for coming, what sort of solace he’s here to chase.

Clint has his back to her as she approaches, is shooting arrows into a series of targets affixed to the nearby trees. His quiver’s almost empty, she sees, which is probably just as well, because the targets are damn near saturated, some of the shafts split by later shots.

She stops a few paces away, is trying to decide whether she ought to make some sort of noise to alert him to her presence or simply wait for him to run out of ammunition. In the end she does neither, because Clint turns after his next shot, raising an eyebrow at her.

“You trying to become the latest casualty or what?” He looks exhausted, eyes shadowed by circles so dark they might be bruises, and Natasha wonders whether he’s slept at all since they left South America.

“Not going to ask how I found you?” she says, instead of answering the question. It’s not a real threat, she thinks. She’s known him long enough to recognize when he’s deflecting.

Clint huffs out a bitter laugh, reaches into his pocket and holds out his phone. On the screen is a display identical to the one she’s been following, tracing the path she’s just taken from S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ out to this location. It takes her a moment to register what she’s seeing, to realize that he’s been tracing her signal in return.

“You keeping tabs on me?” says Clint, raising an eyebrow. “Only fair if I get to do the same to you.”

Natasha frowns. “Where?” she asks, unnerved by the fact that he’s managed to plant a tracker on her somehow, and she has no idea when or how he’s done it.

“Handle of your knife,” says Clint, gesturing to the boot where she keeps it concealed. “The one you think I don’t know about when I ask if you’re armed. Fury knows about it too, by the way. Lets you keep it because he trusts me to decide if we can trust you.”

Natasha swallows, resists the urge to go for the weapon, or to question him further about how he’s managed to implant it. That’s not why she’s here, not the answers she needs to find today. “What are you doing out here?”

Clint is silent for a long moment, as if deciding how much further he wants to let her in. “Paying tribute, I guess you could say.”

“To what?” she asks, though she has a feeling that she doesn’t need to.

“You know,” says Clint, turning away from her again to go pull the arrows from the targets, one by one.

It’s then that she catches sight of his hands, realizes that he’s worked them raw, isn’t even reacting to the pain she knows he must be feeling from the tattered skin.

* * *

Inside the cabin, there’s a communications array sophisticated enough to impress even Natasha. She hasn’t expected to find that here, has figured he’d leave technology behind--more or less--in his quest to do whatever sort of penance this is.

But there’s a computer monitor, she sees, with an internet connection, and a satellite TV feed. On the screen, there’s a report she recognizes as one from the S.H.I.E.L.D. extraction team, detailing the ruins of the hospital they left behind, the estimated number of victims, and the ones yet to be identified. Her stomach does a little flip-flop at that, but she steps closer anyway, sees the stacks of papers that line the desk.

Clint is standing behind her in silence, waiting for her to finish looking around and drawing her own conclusions, she thinks. Picking up the top sheet of paper, Natasha sucks in a breath as she recognizes the words in Portuguese. It’s a news article about the blast, about those missing and presumed dead. More notice than she thinks the media has paid to the hospital in the last several years; people disappeared there all the time with nobody looking, but now the disaster’s making headlines. Feeling vaguely sick, she flips through the stacks, all of the pages newspaper articles and obituaries.

“Why?” she asks Clint, when she’s finished.

“To remind me,” he says quietly.

“Of what?” asks Natasha, forcing herself to meet his eyes, to feel some of the pain and disappointment in them.

“Of why I have to be better,” he breathes. “Of what happens when I’m not enough.”

* * *

Four days pass before Clint decides it’s time to go back home, to face life again with some renewed sense of duty.

Natasha observes him the whole time, stands by in silence as he drills until his fingers bleed, as he sits up reading the articles, the memorials, watches the news like he’s trying to memorize every word.

“What now?” she asks, on the last morning, when he’s climbing back into his truck, his hands still ragged on the wheel, the softness of the dawn light not quite enough to conceal the marks he’s given himself.

“Now we go back,” Clint says resignedly. He offers her a tired smile, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Now we try to be better.”

They don’t say another word about it, back in the too-real world of S.H.I.E.L.D., but she thinks something’s changed between them, ever so slightly. Clint doesn’t wipe his phone, doesn’t erase her tracker. Natasha doesn’t stop carrying her knife.

* * *

It happens three more times over the next two years.

A bad tip in Cairo, and the diplomat they’re supposed to be protecting is dead with his jugular slit open, blood pooling onto the lavish hotel carpet. A mark in Istanbul, who takes a room full of hostages, shoots each one and then himself in the head. A party in London, where half of the guests fall dead two hours in, internal organs liquefied by a toxin in the wine.

Natasha is there for all of it, the sense of responsibility weighing more heavily on her shoulders with each casualty. She understands now, she thinks, if only because Clint’s morals have become her own, his debt to the innocent and the unprotected shared just as much as their partnership.

She follows him to the cabin each time, too, because he’s stopped trying to hide from her, has come to expect her companionship, she thinks. They’re in this together now, more completely a unit than anything she would have imagined possible a few short years ago.

Natasha drills herself now, too. In the evenings, they pass the heavy pages back and forth, like together they might become somehow enough, might learn how to transcend tragedy once and for all.

* * *

Half a year before Natasha hears the words _Avengers Initiative_ for the first time, before everything in their lives changes, they’re in Chelyabinsk, to retrieve a scientist S.H.I.E.L.D.’s managed to recruit.

They’ve arranged to meet the woman in a restaurant, to escort her safely from there. Everything appears to be going well--Natasha’s arrived, spotted their rendezvous at a table near the door. Clint’s outside, concealed on the roof of one of the nearby buildings, to cover them as they exit into the street.

Natasha takes a breath, sits down opposite the woman, and freezes. It’s been eight years since she’s seen this face--it belonged to a child, then, but she recognizes it now all the same. The girl’s given name is Oksana, and she was barely ten years old when Natasha defected, when she finally managed to escape the Room’s torments.

Oksana never left, though, she is suddenly certain. She’s probably just celebrated her own graduation, if Natasha is remembering the years correctly.

“Hello, Natalia,” she breathes, and holds out an open palm, as if in greeting.

She’s holding a detonator, Natasha realizes suddenly, a delicate little switch she has no hope of reaching first. The room is probably rigged, and she’s acutely aware of the dozens of civilians surrounding them, innocent people at dinner with their families.

“Don’t do this,” she breathes as Oksana stands.

It isn’t enough, of course, and Natasha watches as she closes her hand, the first shockwave of explosions following immediately. It’s all Natasha can do to throw herself through the nearest window, curling into a ball on the ground as the heat washes over her and the world goes dark.

* * *

She’s dimly aware of being moved, of waking shallowly a few times on a Quinjet. When she finally comes fully back to consciousness, she’s lying on a lumpy couch, slowly recognizes the buttery walls and the smells of coffee and sweet grass she’s come to associate with the farmhouse.

“There you are,” comes Laura’s voice from the kitchen as Natasha sits up slowly. She enters Natasha’s field of view a moment later, carrying a glass of water which she sets on the coffee table. “How are you feeling?”

“Sore,” Natasha answers, still assessing. Her head hurts--probably a mild concussion, she’s had enough to be able to tell, and at least a couple of bruised ribs. But she’s gotten off lucky, all things considered. Too lucky. She’s willing to bet nobody else in the restaurant survived, except probably Oksana, who would plan better than to blow herself up.

Laura grimaces sympathetically, producing a bottle of ibuprofen to go with the water. “I told Clint he should have brought you to the hospital instead.”

Natasha clears her throat, which feels dry and scratchy. “And I bet he told you that I wouldn’t have wanted that. Correctly.” The cabin is his place, she realized a long time ago. She doesn’t have one, yet, or at least not one he knows about. So he’s brought her here, the safest alternative he knows.

Laura sighs, opening the bottle and shaking a few pills into the cap. “Matched pair, the two of you. At least take these before you get started with the self-flagellation ritual.”

“Does it bother you?” Natasha asks suddenly, accepting the pills and swallowing them with a sip of the water. Her stomach is rolling, but she’s never been one to let nausea win. It’s occurred to her before, that _she’s_ the one Clint comes to when he’s hurting worst, that he’s become the same to her. She’s come to love Laura, too, has never doubted Clint’s devotion to his family. Yet there are parts of himself he doesn’t show to them, parts that Natasha alone is allowed to witness.

Laura smiles sadly, a longing in her face that Natasha can’t quite read. “He’s always done this, you know? Gone off alone to--lick his wounds, or something. I accepted a long time ago that I was never going to be there with him. Mostly I’m just glad that now he has somebody else.”

* * *

After Loki, Clint practically moves into the cabin. Natasha spends the first week after New York out there with him, back to watching again, because she’s afraid of what will happen to them both if she joins in on his self-administered punishment. Instead she makes sure that he’s eating, runs her fingers through his hair when he falls asleep on the couch with his head in her lap, and waits for the nightmares to come. She watches as he papers the walls with the faces of the agents he’s killed, doesn’t tell him that she thinks he’s being terribly unfair to himself. He isn’t ready to hear it, she knows.

Natasha leaves again when S.H.I.E.L.D. needs her back, when there’s another job requiring her specific skills. For the first time, Clint doesn’t come with her, but she isn’t really expecting that he will. They’re on different paths right now, seeking different sorts of redemption.

She searches for him again, after S.H.I.E.L.D. falls, goes to the cabin with the reports in hand, the names of the innocents she’s been manipulated into harming at the behest of Hydra. The place is deserted, though, the walls still plastered with portraits of ghosts. She stays for a few weeks all the same, letting the solitude seep into her bones.

Clint is at home, on the farm, she learns when she returns to New York. For the first time, she resents that, just a little, wishes she felt able to follow him there. But she has her own sort of rebuilding to do, and she sets about that.

Still, she can’t deny the relief she feels when Stark gathers the Avengers and Clint reappears, gives her a sheepish smile that says he knows exactly what she’s been thinking. They don’t talk about it, though, just move forward as they always have.

* * *

Three months after the new Avengers facility opens, after Natasha’s spent countless hours training with her team, and received a myriad of baby pictures from Laura, she wakes in the middle of the night. It isn’t a normal awakening, not from a bad dream, or from her defensive instincts alerting her to possible danger. She feels peaceful, she realizes, but alert all the same.

Sitting up, she glances around the room for a moment before a light outside the window catches her attention. Moving closer, Natasha pulls aside the curtains, then opens the window itself. Clint is standing on the green a few hundred yards away, firing arrows into the sky. Each one explodes in a shower of sparks, like his very own shooting stars.

Smiling, she closes the window and scrambles to dress.

“What,” she teases, when she gets within earshot of Clint, “you too good for throwing rocks at a girl’s window?”

He smiles at her, but he looks tired even in the darkness, haggard in a way she feels deep within her own body. She remembers the shadows under his eyes, that first time at the cabin, thinks of the cracks in his fingertips, now hardened into scars.

“I need you,” he says warmly, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and pressing a kiss to her temple as he lets the bow rest at his side. “I need to be here.”

“Yeah?” she breathes, though it doesn’t entirely surprise her. They’ve both known for years that Clint was never going to retire, not really. She’s known from the day she met and followed him that he’s incapable of keeping his abilities or his life for himself. He will give until the day he can’t give any more.

“Yeah,” Clint echoes. “Because--I’m not done. I’m not done trying, not done getting better.”

Natasha leans into him, looks up into the sky. “I know. So--welcome back.”


End file.
